 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Feindel and today we're here with Peter Hoppenberger. We're talking about how history is here to help. I really like that name. And Peter and I are going to talk about, you know, together in this show. We're going to talk about how history out of the 30s helps inform us about what's happening now because I think we're having trouble understanding exactly what is happening now. You know, as an ongoing inquiry is to who are the 74 million people? Who are the people who are so divided about so many things? Who are the people who support Trump even after he takes steps to break the Constitution on a daily basis and lies 30,000 times? Who are those people and why are they following him? And the inquiry we want to make is what happened in the 30s. Are there similarities to the elements that dictators use to come to power? And, you know, in evaluating that, maybe we can find ways to reverse this process. And short of reversing this process, my guess is we'll have some more of it. Good afternoon, Peter. Nice to see your smile. Good to see you. Lovely shirt as always. Thank you, man. I said we stand for you. Shopping for you? Of course. So, you know, I mean, I'm sure you've observed that this is not going away anytime soon, that we have a divided country and we have some people who don't use critical thinking and who follow the leader wherever the leader goes, whatever he, whoever he shoots on Fifth Avenue, so to speak, whoever he, you know, incites to violence. And we need to figure out why they do that and why they vote for him after all the mischievous that he has accomplished in four years. And, you know, I guess what I, what I, my, my own points of reference are propaganda, scapegoating and the big lie, those things that we all learned about when we studied this period at school. And I wonder what your thoughts are about the elements of the rise of dictatorships, absolutism, you know, in Europe, in the 30s and whether those things are present now and what we can learn from the comparison. Okay, well, thanks a lot for inviting me, as always. And I love chatting with you. Let me begin by saying that I don't represent the University of Hawaii, as you know, so I'm happy to have a very frank chat with you and you can, your listeners can just blame me. All right, so if anybody wants to storm any buildings, it's just my condo. Please don't storm David Lasker's office. I guess we should begin by looking at the nature of comparison, because I think folks, folks are inclined to throw around a lot of terms these days. And I'm not faulting them. But as a historian versus, for example, a political scientist, we try to look at context. So what's happening when, and try to figure out if the essences of what's happening then, for example, the 30s are the same as the essences that are happening now or when you're going to compare. So I think I would probably be wary of using terminology, but let's use a term comparison, right, doesn't lock us into things are exactly the same or equivalency. So I would say you're absolutely right about the 30s. And we can talk about the 30s. I also think though, the problem at least in the West, and I'm using the West very broadly. So generally Western European ideas, American ideas, where they were imposed or adopted, this problem probably goes back even further. So let's start with the 30s, then we can push it back a little bit. I think I would use the term authoritarian perhaps more than a dictator or a popular kind of dictator, popular authoritarianism. And if we began by just comparing, so you're asking me, you know, what can we learn from the 30s? I think there's some similarities that help us and we don't need to go to Europe. We could just look at the United States. There's an old adage in people of the Jewish persuasion that anybody debating who refers to Hitler or the Holocaust, ipso facto loses the debate. Okay, that's an unfair playing card, right? It's the ace. You can't play that card. So let's play the card of the 30s, which I think is very apropos. And let's look at the US, which a lot of people already already know about. For example, the rise of people like Father Coughlin, the rise of Lindberg, Lindberg, because obviously the American first was something that I don't know whether Trump knew it or not. I'm sure some of his political writers did was a reference to isolationism, right? America going alone. Coughlin, as I said, using the radio, scapegoating, primarily Jews, but when Coughlin got on the radio, you know, Protestants were included and people of color. He's most noted for being an anti-Semite. We can talk about a significant economic crisis, which can't just be tweaked. So, you know, stagflation under Nixon, it could be tweaked and we could manage in a general way. But this economic crisis is of a nature similar to the oppression where it's not just tweaking that you need to do. You need to actually rethink the fundamental nature of the economy. So I think those are all very, very important uncertainties, which can very easily lead people to follow. You know, I would not say Trump is charismatic in the traditional way of charisma, but he is very capable of what we might call the dog whistle approach, right? It's not necessarily that you're charismatic, but you know the terms to use. You know the metaphors. You know the analogies. One of the elements that I see, you know, the elements that in the pot, you know, in the environment, in the US in the 30s, and also in Europe in the 30s, is that, you know, there was a depression. People were unhappy with their lot. They were having this kind of national identity crisis about what happened at World War I. And so were we. You know, I mean, make the world safe for democracy was not universal. And I think by the time, you know, we got ensconced in the 30s, we really wondered where we were going and whether, you know, there was a future for us. And I think a lot of people like that were in Europe. And a lot of people like that now, they're not happy. You can say the stock market, you know, went over 30,000 points, but that doesn't help a lot of people. They don't have a good life and they know it. In fact, they sit there. This is very interesting. I think Nvidia's comparison, Veblen, if you ever looked at him, they sit there and look at the TV. And the TV shows them these expensive cars. It shows them all these expensive things that they will never have. And this makes them invidious. It makes them unhappy. And I think we have a lot of people in this country who are unhappy. And that's probably a major element in reaching out and accepting the word of a cold figure like Trump. Okay. I absolutely agree. Let's push that a little bit. Economic unhappiness is intensified when there is clear, articulate economic inequality. So yes, I watch TV and I may not get the Ferrari, but I do look and I see other people driving that Ferrari. So, and that was also true during the Great Depression, of course. There's the old jokes about the wealthy yelling outside of Roosevelt's apartment in New York, claiming he was a communist. The New Yorker has wonderful ads. And there certainly were people. Now, the stock market, of course, did crash. That is a major difference. But there was inequality. So I would agree with you. It's not just the sense of I'm going to need three or four jobs to be able just to pay rent. It's that I do look around and I do see other people doing quite well. I don't want to pick on anybody in particular. I don't think that gets us very far. But we might think, for example, Jeff Bezos, and it's not to pick on him. But the sense that, yes, I absolutely need Amazon to deliver what I can barely afford. And the owner of the company is doing very well. Now, that's simplistic. I don't want to leave it there. I don't think that gets us very far as to picking on an individual. Because in that sense, like picking on President Trump, we're missing the system. As you talk about the 30s, there's a tremendous amount of scholarship on Hitler. But much of it misses the point, which is why people followed Hitler. You can do all you want about studying Hitler. There are claims that he was missing a testicle. There are claims that his mother was killed by a Jew. And there are lots of psychological analyses of Trump, which is fine as far as leader per se. But as a historian, one of the issues is why people follow those individuals. That is a question. So I think that, again, the 30s provide a good comparison in Europe. One of the things that people have been discussing about fascism and have tried to differentiate American fascism or Trump from European fascism was the experience of the First World War. And you mentioned that. But I think that that allows us to think about the significance of war in Trumpism. And it's not just the militarism. I mean, when you look at what a difference between Black Lives Matter, well, yes, there was violence, but most people were not armed. Most people did not serve in the military and wear a garb versus what was in fact a particularly well organized military assault on the Capitol. That was the nature of fascism. It has always been the nature of fascism, the march, the militaristic aspect. In fact, it's not violence to actually achieve something. It's violence in and of itself, which is so important. So I would say the element of militarism or violence. And that's where I'm not trying to read you astray, but there's a lot of scholarship saying that European fascism per se arose in the 30s out of veterans, people who felt they missed the war, of course, the Germans stab in the back argument. And I think there are some very significant comparative points in Trumpism. And I'd like us to think about really the legacy of the Vietnam War. And I think the legacy of the Vietnam War drives much of Trumpism. The Vietnam War mythology, like the American Civil War, lost cause mythology is based upon a big lie. The big lie about the Vietnam mythology is the U.S. could have and should have won the war militarily, but it was held back by bureaucrats, held back by kids with long hair protesting. That's our own American version of the stab in the back. And if you look historically, because I want to push this back, you know, before the 1930s, because there were authoritarian popular dictators in Europe and the West well before the 1930s. They were fascists with little F well before the 1930s. And one of the consistent of building stones and bricks of these kinds of movements is the argument that we have lost a war because of somebody else. So the classic case is the driver's affair. It's the blame game. Right. But you lose something, you're likely to look for somebody to blame. Right. But the key point here I really think is not just the economy is a war. When you think about the phrase make America great again, part of that is military strength. It's quote unquote control of the streets. It is the assertion of power. Now, Trump is not a war monger in many ways. He's quite the opposite. But he does want to have the ability to assert militarism and power at home probably as much as overseas. And part of making America great again, quote unquote, is to be selling weapons all around the world. And that's a twofer for Trumpism, because its ability to make money, to employ people to build weapons, but send the weapons overseas so that Americans don't die from the use of those weapons. And I think we see historically and to push it further back after all, the first really prominent enduring popular dictator or popular authoritarian figure was Napoleon. Napoleon was the one who articulated modern propaganda. Napoleon was the one who believed in rule of law. And the Napoleonic code in many cases actually was more liberal than a lot of others. But it wasn't the rule of law in which there were independent courts making independent decisions, right? It was the rule of law in which the political figures, the political party ensured who the judges were. So yes, there was a rule of law. And that's been very common. So there were plenty of laws and not security, plenty. They were all imposed by judges who were approved by the party. That's one aspect I think that scholars have pointed out, and I'm not telling you anything new, that one of the lasting legacies of Trumpism, which is really McConnellism, it's not Trumpism. McConnellism is control of federal judiciary. And McConnell blocks most of Obama's appointments. We know about the famous Supreme Court ones, but he blocked all of the lower ones. So for example, the recent Supreme Court appointee out of the Court of Appeals, she is in her position because McConnell blocks a very talented, capable African-American woman from that position. All right, so this goes very deeply. And that I think, again, none of your viewers will think of this as anything new. They all know it is that authoritarianism, popular authoritarianism is in good part controlled through the legal system. And that doesn't mean just making the laws, right? You're a lawyer. You know that reviewing the laws, are they constitutional or not? Are they acceptable or not? And I think when people talk about authoritarianism, fascism with a little f, because we don't have a fascist party, the Republicans are not a fascist party. There are people in there with fascist inclinations, but we're really not talking about them. They don't seem to have multi-dimensional to them. It's just whatever Trump wants. It seems to be whatever Trump and McConnell wants. I don't think McConnell should be given a pass. No, I totally agree with you. And I don't trust them now on the question of the impeachment trial. But let me go back to the question of how these guys got in power, and they're really mischievous. You know, once you get in power, you can be mischievous. The question is, how did they get in power? A nation put them in power. The system put them in power. And how did we get off the track as Europe did and as the US did in earlier parts of our history, where the public was fooled, you know? Demagogue comes up. Demagogue lies to them. Demagogue uses propaganda and scapegoatism and whatever other tools are out there. And presto, the demagogue, is in power and he's liberated. He's free to do whatever he wants, because the people who voted for him will follow him. And it's that relationship I'm so interested in for this comparison. Why do these people who got up on the steps of the Capitol and did really terrible things, why are these people who are attacking the state capitals and just doing completely outrageous things at the other end of a dog whistle, why do they follow him? What is it about the United States? What has history done to make them like this? It's sociology, psychology, mass psychology, but ultimately it's history that we can study and figure out what happened here. Okay, so let's go back to where you started, which is in trying to find a comparison. So let's do two things if it's okay with your listeners. Let's think in general terms, for example, what has happened in the U.S. could be compared to other things and though remind ourselves that even in the world of global social media, each political nation is in fact unique. That may not be a good thing, that might be a bad thing, but there are characteristics of the U.S. system or the American's history, which are clearly different from Europe in the 1930s or look, there are plenty of leaders like Trump, Modi in India, the leaders of Hungary, Putin. So they're also similar but different. So let's talk about the similarities and then the differences. Okay, I mean the similarities probably go back to what you saw in the studies, which is the nature of despotism, which is nothing new. And despots have always appealed to quote, unquote, the mob. Always. That's not. And they have usually gained power by kind of gangsterism. And I think the way to understand Trump is through his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani has gone on a record saying every Sunday, he and his staff watched The Godfather. But he said that and I think, and this is not an ethnic slur by any means at all. And you and I both know I love the city of New York, but it is a kind of romanticization right of the New York bully. Each city has its own style. And Mayor Daley was clearly a bully. Okay, Rizzo in Philadelphia, but there's a New York style. And that reminds us of a kind of gangsterism, which right could be a matter of shooting something in the head. And that's how the early Nazis began. They were just Well, I am thinking it goes to the Al Capone, Johnny and Clyde. These were heroic figures. These are romantic figures. You know, where the crowd, the mob, the people supported them like them. They became hero, anti heroes, right. And I think maybe that's what you're talking about. We're talking about that combined with they exist because they can claim to be representing the mob against X and X is almost always the establishment, the orthodoxy, the institutions. And so when you look at people who say the several thousand who stormed the Capitol, you know, it wasn't just they listened to Trump. It was that they were anti establishment, anti institutions. They were libertarian thoughts about the integrity of libertarianism. All right. So, and that's also a case in which all these arise, right? I mean, the Nazi party was a minority party, but clearly there were problems with the Biden Republic, the establishment of the minority republic. Okay, clearly Napoleon rose because the revolutionary establishment wasn't working. So it always is. And again, this is nothing profound. I mean, everybody talks about this, but, you know, you do need a target. And that target is filled by things you said to begin the big lie, right? The establishment is only interested in itself, for example, or the establishment's only interest in helping certain people. I think that's, that's true throughout. Sometimes as a historian, maybe not as a sociologist, as a historian, I often think of the difficulty of an establishment is even when it's virtuous and its promises are profound, no establishment can actually ever come through with all the promises. It just can't. And so that's a political problem. Like take liberal England, for example, lots of difficulties and everybody knows that. But there were the promises of, for example, property ownership. Okay, how do you rectify that promise with unbelievable poverty? Right? So even when you have a well meaning establishment, look at the difficulties FDR had, you know, well meaning. So I think I've agreed with you entirely. I'm just saying there needs to be attention. And the power of the popular dictator is to say, right, I'm going to come in, I'm going to destroy the establishment, which has been destroying you. So there's a sense of resentment, a sense of alienation. Now, having said that, I think there are some clear reasons in US history, why this happened. All right, some, I think every, most of them say everybody already has heard. So again, I don't know if I'm adding to the conversation, but maybe we're putting it all together, right? We're putting you in little pieces. Okay, I don't think anybody today can wake up and not be convinced about the centrality of racism. Deep, deep racism. And that racism and the well intention goal of trying to overcome that has promoted resentment. I mean, look at the Auschwitz sweatshirt. Look at the noose. Look at the lack of African American participation. Look at the way everybody has said that those protesters probably were aided and vetted. I didn't see any policemen helping Black Lives Matter, right? I didn't see any policemen opening the door to let Black Lives Matter into a building. I think we have to recognize the role of racism in our system. Yeah, but it's, the racism isn't the Black Lives Matters people. It's the white guys. No, no, I'm saying the comparison. No, I agree. The comparison, one of the points, the data points racism would be to compare and contrast the different approaches to law enforcement. So Black Lives Matter, which begins and continues as really a peaceful movement. I know there's some violence. We know that. Okay, but the violence is an exception. The violence is not built into Black Lives Matter movement. Yet Black protesters were blocked from buildings. Black protesters were attacked and arrested. Peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. Look, a 70-year-old man was thrown aside by the police. A 60-year-old veteran was beaten up. All right? That didn't happen. Trump is appealing to the police. He's appealing to the white guys. I think we have the same thing happened in Germany. You know, you take somebody who's been at the wrong end of anti-Semitism and then you widen that divide is what Trump has done as Adolf Hitler did. You widen that divide by inciting the racists who are white and not minority in each case and have them go after the minority. And that's part of the scapegoat. That would be one point in U.S. history, which is to recognize the significance of race and the failure of the establishment. Even, you know, the well-meaning establishment because of the American idea, and look, it's not incorrect or correct, but it is an American idea that somehow the Civil War and somehow the 13th Amendment did everything that needed to be done. And there are plenty of well-meaning people who believe that. Okay. The establishment, unfortunately, has pretty well accepted that until the great society, really. I mean, even FDR had some weaknesses on this question, but where isn't really in social... Certainly Woodrow Wilson and another... Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are people who are... I'm not even convinced Trump can think deeply enough to be a racist. I just think he wants attention. Wilson was a racist through and through. So that was the... I guess we will definitely continue this. So that would be one point. And you could draw some analogies, right? Certainly anti-Semitism in Germany, anti-Islamic fervor in India. There's some similarities, but race and ethnicity and religion are not the same. So it is a racial problem here. Secondly, again, nothing profound. We have to remember that we have a system which is not direct voting. So Mrs. Clinton and Joe Biden both overwhelmingly won the popular vote. We need to remember this. And it's not about... And we have the Electoral College, which is an unusual system, right? So the Electoral College appeals to something which is in American history, which is very strong regionalism, which began, I think every American historian recognizes, with the need to allow the slave states and allow less populated agricultural areas to balance with the Hamiltonian view. And the Hamiltonian view, right, is the view in many cases, very similar in many cases, to the Democratic Party. Democratic Party is primarily urban. It's not primarily rural. Democratic Party is primarily a party of taking capitalism and property and trying to spread it, trying to. And that's Hamilton, right? It's economic progress. But there has been a build-in, right, antagonism. To me, a lot of this, and I'm not an American historian expert, let me just end with this and we'll continue. A lot of this goes back to, for example, the Articles of Confederation, States' Rights. The U.S. does not particularly resolve problems that all large polities have, which is the federal versus the states. The Russians have a different answer to it, right? The children have had a different answer to it. You know, what it tells us is that people don't believe in the system. A lot of people don't believe in the system. They don't believe in the electoral college. They don't believe that, you know, the government is doing the right thing. Whether they're on the right side of a given issue morally or not, they just don't believe in the government. And they don't believe that they're part of the government. You know, my whole thing is, I don't think the draft should have ended or national service should have ended because that allows people to separate themselves from the government and see themselves as disconnected from the government. And I think that's got to be part of it. You know, the Reichstag was an interesting symbolic act that took advantage of the fact that people didn't have confidence in the government anymore. And I think that's part of Trump's thing too. But here, we only have a minute or two left, Peter. And I want to see if there's any lessons in here that we could, you know, refer to to reverse some of this and to make people trust the government, to make people distrust the demagogue, to rid ourselves of the kind of poison that he has exacerbated over the past four years. Is there anything we can learn from history on how to deal with this? Because right now, we are in crisis, you know, even if they don't storm the capital again or the state capitals, you know, even if he's, you know, removed and not moved, doesn't matter, as you say. The question is, what can we do for the 74 million people who have been, in my view, deceived? Okay, one minute, 50 seconds. So let me say some things that will lead us to our future conversation. Okay, one is if we're going to have a participatory democratic political system, we have to make a commitment to compromise. So one of the first steps politically is to develop, and this means turning one's back a little bit on the extremes in both cases, but look for political compromises so we can build some precedents. You know, I've heard that so many times, but if one side of the compromise discussion is really loony tunes, just awful. I mean, like the second amendment. And you know what, some people act in ways in which they are not relevant to the conversation. There is no compromise with people who storm the cap. That's not the issue. Are there compromises with some of the Republicans who have finally said, all right, enough is enough? And are there compromises with some of the more, and again, I'm not making a moral judgment, so I'm just talking about the spectrum, the more extreme Democrats, we're going to push Biden as well. So that's why I meant by a compromise. So for example, Biden is going to have to reach out for his government, obviously, not just Biden. Administration at all levels, because a lot of this is state and local too, right? For example, in Pennsylvania, the Republican legislature refused to seat a democratically elected Democrat. So this is not just a federal thing, right? We should be very careful. This is a state and local thing as well. It's going to be a matter of state, local, and federal people having to put aside perhaps their wildest dreams or the timescale of those wildest dreams and find relatively small, doable successes. And I'll leave you with one that maybe will be of interest to some of your listeners. The question of outstanding student loans and outstanding loans that nurses and doctors still have, that should be really right across the board kind of issue. That's not a Republican or Democratic issue, right? You talk about national service, well, somebody who spends 14 hours taking care of COVID virus victims or patients, that's national service. So I'm talking about small steps like that, agreeing on a number for the checks that need to be sent and admitting that some people getting the checks should not be getting the checks. There's no perfect system, but the desire for perfection, right? The old phrase is, the good is a victim of the perfect. We have to emphasize, I think Biden is actually in a position to do that. And I think that his biggest problem is not going to come from the Republicans. I think it's going to come from the left in the Democratic Party. That's a good place to end our discussion. That's a scary, scary, but I don't mean the left in a disparaging way. So I'm using a neutral way. So people who want to take what you said about the system in crisis and radically altering the system. And I can just say, and I'm sure your viewers know, that I don't necessarily disagree with them. I'm just trying to look at this in an impersonal, analytical, political way. And Karl Marx always said that don't worry about the people marching towards you. Look to your right and your left. They're going to be the people are going to cause you the biggest problems. So let's do it again. History is here to help extend this conversation. We'll find a way to build on it. And a couple of weeks time we'll be back. Okay, Peter. That sounds very good. And you can let me know what topic. I mean, we can continue this one. If there's something else that you'd like to talk about, I can also reach out to see if we can get a guest to know a lot more than I do. All right. Thank you very much.